Oracle To Turn 10g Database On Midmarket

Oracle 10g, due by year's end, will offer easier installation, management and tuning perks to make it more attractive to smaller, IT-constrained customers, company executives said last week.

"One of our goals is to go downmarket," Oracle CFO Jeff Henley said last Thursday, adding that to do that, Oracle must make the database easier to deploy, maintain and less expensive.

One new feature, called cross-platform transportable table space, will make it easier for database administrators to move databases from system to system "at the speed of FTP," said Andy Mendelsohn, vice president of database development at Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif.

In addition, a new rapid application development tool, called HTML DB, will be included in 10g. It is comparable to Microsoft Access, the PC database known for its visual programming capabilities.

Oracle 10g will come on one CD and install in 10 to 20 minutes, Mendelsohn claimed, adding that his 12-year old daughter could do the job.

This is a definite change of message for Oracle, which built its name in large accounts. It comes at a time when Microsoft SQL Server dominates the database midmarket and as IBM is mounting an aggressive challenge with DB2 Express.

But Oracle needs to put its money and marketing where its mouth is, solution providers say. "Oracle is not at all credible" in this market, said George Brown, president of Database Solutions, a Cherry Hill, N.J., solution provider that works with all the major brands.

Microsoft has successfully parlayed its upsizing wizard to move thousands of Access users to SQL Server, Brown said.

No Oracle executive would address the biggest question: price. Last month, Oracle finally conceded it had to make a pricing move with Oracle Standard Edition One, a version of 9i priced at $5,995 and restricted to use on one CPU. Oracle's enterprise database is $40,000 per processor plus $10,000 per processor for Real Application Clusters.